All that is Solid … is a radical blog that seeks to promote a future beyond capital's social universe. "All that is solid melts into air" (Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, 'The Communist Manifesto', 1848).

Information for Social Change
Glenn edited Information for Social Change Issue No.23, a Special Issue on ‘Education for Social Change’.
This is the general URL for the journal:http://libr.org/ISC/
This is the URL for Issue No.23: http://libr.org/isc/toc.html

From 1994 to 2001, Glenn was a member of the Hillcole Group of Radical Left Educators.

With Tony Green (University of London, Institute of Education), I ran the Marxism and Education: Renewing Dialogues seminars, twice-yearly (May and October) from October 2002 to October 2008.

Thanx for the blog, Glenn, to which I have subscribed for quite a while now.

You & fellow readers may be interested to know that Jonathan Sperber, a historian of the 19th century & recent biographer of Marx, made an interesting remark in June on the ‘all that is solid melts into air’ phrase, in line with his placing of Marx in his own time, not the 20th century or the 21st.

The famous words appear at the beginning of the ‘Manifesto of the Communist Party’, & the above translation is by Sam Moore & Engels. Sperber does not refer to other renderings, either Helen Macfarlane’s made in 1850, ‘Every thing fixed and stable vanishes’, or Hal Draper’s ‘All that is established and stable evaporates away’.

The original phrase is ‘Alles Ständische und Stehende verdampft’, & this is what Sperber says:

“‘Stehende’ and ‘Ständische’ both come from the verb ‘to stand,’ and is used here as sort of a pun — it refers to both ‘that which exists’ and the society of orders, the old regime world that still existed in Prussia and Austria. ‘Verdampft’ means to ‘evaporate,’ to ‘go up in smoke.’ What Marx was suggesting here is that the power of capitalism — capitalist steam engines (‘Dampf’ means ‘steam’ in German) — would ‘evaporate’ the society of orders. This would also bring to an end the intellectual world that went along with it: Romanticism, the glorification of the Middle Ages, and religion. Marx’s comment at the end about ‘man is at last compelled to face, with sober senses, his real conditions of life’ is about an age of realism, e.g., literary realism. One of Marx’s friends when he was in exile in Paris was Heinrich Heine, the great early German realist.

“Mine is a very different take on the passage. The way it has been interpreted in the 20th century is that capitalism produces many new consumer demands; we have a world which is constantly changing in communications, artistic trends, etc. That’s a 20th century reinterpretation of Marx’s ideas.”

(I don’t know what you think, but Sperber’s literary realism point seems awry, especially as here the ‘Manifesto’ evokes this written four years before: “The criticism of religion disillusions man, so that he will think, act and fashion his reality like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses, so that he will move around himself as his own true sun” (‘A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right”. Introduction’, Gregor Benton (tr.), Penguin).)

In the spirit of a certain completeness, the late 20th century populariser of the ‘all that is solid . . .’ phrase, Marshall Berman, sadly died this Wednesday, 11 September (the 40th anniversary of the Chilean coup).